Gravity's Rainbow
WWII paranoia, rocket trajectories, behavioral psychology, entropy, and the systems that govern human life. The Pulitzer committee refused to give it the prize (calling it "obscene, unreadable, overwritten"); it won the National Book Award instead. Pynchon invented the "systems novel" here in 1973. The encyclopedia as narrative form.
Part One introduces hundreds of characters with nothing to hang them on, and readers quit inside the first hundred pages, describing prose that "feels like reading a series of math equations." The technical digressions on rocketry and chemistry read as display rather than illumination. The raunch and cruelty sit flush against slapstick in a way plenty find gross rather than daring. Seven hundred pages arrive nowhere in particular. And the reputation has an official asterisk: in 1974 the Pulitzer board overruled its own jury, calling the book "unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and in parts obscene," one member admitting he had read a third. One reader compares admiring it to admiring something "duct-taped on the wall of a contemporary art museum."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
